Our round the word trip (29): conclusion
The final stages of our journey home involved a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles of just 50 minutes on an United Boeing 757-200, a period of four hours at LAX airport, and then another flight from LA to London of 10 hrs 40 mins on an Air New Zealand Boeing 777-300. The last flight of our long holiday – the 12th excluding helicopters – was not just almost half a day in duration but involved a time difference of 8 hours, so we arrived at London Heathrow really jet-lagged – to be met by a temperature of 2C/36F and snow flurries (In April!).
How to summarise such a fantastic holiday?
The bare statistics of the trip are four countries in 31 days, involving six time zones and two languages, taking 12 flights totalling almost 56 hours, and staying in 13 hotels. We even managed to meet five sets of friends in three different countries. The trip has added three new countries to our total which, in Roger’s case, brings the grand total of nations visited to a round 60.
It was a great month to be away from home since, while we had very hot weather in Thailand and Australia and really warm weather in New Zealand, most of the UK had snow and overall it was the coldest March there for 50 years (1962).
On such a fabulous trip – our furthest and longest together – it is a challenge to pick out all the highlights, but among them would be the visit to the Temple of the Emerald Buddha in Bangkok, our helicopter flight over Ulhuru, snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef, climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge, our helicopter ride to the Franz Josef & Fox Glaciers, the cruise on Milton Sound, the jet boat ride in Skippers Canyon, and the views of San Francisco from Sausalito.
By visiting Australia & New Zealand, we have now been to every continent on Earth – but there are still many more countries to see and (we hope) many more holidays to come. This one though will always remain the BIG one. As well as our memories and this record, we have almost 1100 photographs to help us recall the adventure.
Thanks to taking an iPad with us and having access to WiFi almost everywhere, this is the first time that we have blogged about a holiday as it has happened and this is the last such blog posting. From now on, NightHawk will return to normal service. Did you enjoy the trip?
April 4th, 2013 at 5:58 pm
Hello Roger and Vee,
Welcome home! You will need to wrap up warm because it is still very cold here. I will really miss your updates. Yes, I enjoyed the trip. Where next I wonder?
Will look forward to seeing you both soon.
Love Spence